The last couple of days, I've been involved in a debate about what should we be doing to deal with the homeless situation? Everyone agrees that it is problematic for people to be living on the street, but what is the most timely way in which to deal with it?
Some say, "Let's create more shelter beds so that people can have a place to sleep."
Others (myself included) argue, "We've been building emergency shelter for over 20 years and the real reason we turn people away each night is because there is no permanent housing for those who are currently staying in the shelters to go to. "
"But that takes too much time," argue those who want something to be done now.
What do we do? How do we build permanent supportive housing fast enough to really solve this problem? What do you think?
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2 comments:
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines the term "homeless" or "homeless individual or homeless person" as -"(1) an individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence; and (2) an individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is: A) supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill); B) an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or C) a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodations for human beings."
It is not likely that offering temporary shelters will decrease the number of those individuals with no stable housing. In my opinion, permanent housing should be just what the term implies…permanent.
So it is OK to leave people on the streets with inadequate shelter while we wait patiently for the permanent supportive housing to be built?? My argument would be that we go ahead and admit that we don't have enough shelter to house those persons on the Streets and there are in fact waiting lists at virtually all of the facilities with shelter beds and people are being turned away / forced to live on the streets because there are an inadequate number of beds. We say that we have sufficient shelter beds and that we should place a priority on permanent supportive housing. By saying that we have adequate shelter beds we are in fact telling the funders who are having to make hard choices between water / schools / crime .. and placing our funding where the most critical need is seen. When we say we have adequate shelter beds we are telling our community that we have what we need to meet our communities emergency and building shelter beds is not a priority for us.. If we admit that we do not have enough shelter beds to meet our emergency needs, we will force all to make the hard choices to place emergency funds where they should be.. in the form of emergency shelters or toward permanent supportive housing. If we bury our heads in the sand and say we have adequate shelter beds we are making local funding choices easy... I would vote for schools and water and leave funding for housing whether it be shelters or permanent supportive housing out.. the question is not whether supportive housing is better than shelter beds,... that is a no brainer... supportive housing is by far a better solution... it should equally be a no-brainer that we should call the issue to question by admitting that we have a problem and are not able to house persons on the streets because we do not have adequate shelter.. We must make the hard choices and the right choice is not to leave persons on the streets .... call for the question...admit we need to do something and we have an emergency that leaves persons on the streets.. let's either build more shelter beds or build more supportive housing or a combination of both to get these persons off the streets. The longer they remain there the harder it will be to get them off.
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